OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter (July 5 – 12)

The OpenStack Foundation announces the availability of travel grants under the OpenStack Travel Support Program. The program’s aim is to facilitate participation of key contributors to the OpenStack Design Summit covering costs for travel and accommodation. The Travel Support Program is based on the promise of Open Design, one of the founding principles upon which the OpenStack project is built.

OpenStack will celebrate it’s third birthday July 19, and we’re celebrating this month! In three short years, Openstack has truly emerged as the center of cloud innovation, with hundreds of companies around the world relying on OpenStack to run their business. OpenStack is maturing, it’s coming of age and new users being announced every week (Fidelity, Comcast, Best Buy, Bloomberg). Over the past three years, we’ve also seen OpenStack grow internationally. There are now over 40 global user groups and more than 10,000 community members across 121 countries. And we’ve recently crossed the 1,000 authors threshold to the code base. This calls for a big toast to the OpenStack community!

Dan Smith wrote a very hacky text “dashboard” that merges the information from Gerrit and Zuul, and provides a periodically-refreshed view of what is going on. The tool is useful to keep close watch of patches, both to know when they’re close to merging, as well as to know early when they’re failing a test. Catching something early and pushing a fix will kill the job currently in progress and start over with the new patch. This is a more efficient use of resources and lowers the total amount of time before Jenkins will vote on the patch in such a case.

The Swift team announced an initiative to introduce erasure codes in OpenStack Swift. This initiative enables deployers to store data with erasure coding instead of or in addition to Swift’s 3-replica model.

The weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.